The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Benedict Kiely. The small but growing Catholic Church in Norway is blessed to have two bishops now, native Norwegians, under fifty-two years old. Bishop Frederik Hansen, appointed the Bishop of Oslo in July 2025, joins the Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, appointed Bishop of Trondheim, in October 2019. Plans are currently underway to celebrate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Olaf, the canonized King of Norway, spearheaded by Bishop Varden. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Catholic Church in Norway, with 2030 in sight, is being reinvigorated by the leadership of these two comparatively youthful bishops. Bishop Erik, or Erik of Trondheim, to give him an accurate, though more medieval title, is a gentle Viking, although that moniker might sound warlike. The former Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, he is also a former professor of Syriac, a man already highly regarded as a spiritual writer, teacher, and exemplary bishop. Yet now, after having been chosen by Pope Leo to give the annual Spiritual Exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia in the Vatican during the first week of Lent, his stature, principally because of the wisdom and depth of his short reflections, has risen considerably. There is much conjecture that he may be called to lead a dicastery in Rome, something that he would undoubtedly not wish for, and would be a great loss for the Church in Norway. Almost any line or paragraph of Bishop Erik's words would make an excellent subject for Lenten reflection. But there were one or two phrases that speak strongly to a theme that has been much discussed recently in the media, both religious and secular: namely, the appearance of a religious revival, albeit still small, in the West. One of the questions that has yet to be answered is that, despite evidence that attendance has been much higher at celebrations such as Ash Wednesday in many countries, and that baptisms will be up this year at Easter, how many of these people, predominantly young, are returning to regular practice? It's unlikely that a young seeker, quite possibly unbaptized and with little, if any, knowledge of the Christian faith, is crossing the portal of the local Church to hear of either synodality, immigration, or debate over altar rails. Still less will they be seeking music, or something very like it, that was popular when their parents were teenagers, but as Bishop Erik put it sharply, is now distinctly "sounding last-season." More likely, if they are initially searching for beauty to lead them to the experience of the divine, the season they seek will be one long before the advent of bell-bottoms. Varden rightly and perceptively focuses on the reality that, in a highly confused and technocratic age, people are echoing the question of Pilate: "What is truth?" The Church, and ancient wisdom, has long taught that, along with truth, beauty and goodness are paths to God. Bishop Erik warned his audience, with Pope Leo prominently seated in front, that the Church, or certainly many churchmen, imagine that they must ape fashion in order to be 'relevant' and "attract the youth." But this is a great danger for any religious revival. And Bishop Varden echoed, in a sense, Chesterton's belief – which is probably shared by many seekers: "We do not want a Church that will move with the world, we want a Church that will move the world." Bishop Erik, a profoundly cultured man, knows well of which he speaks, both as a university professor and Abbot. Is there anything more embarrassing than a Churchman who is trying to be fashionable? One thinks of Dean Inge's line that a Church that "marries the spirit of this age will be a widow in the next." Bishop Varden gives the Church and, I would argue, every parish, a program for the seeker. In the first place, he argues that those seeking the truth are asking the "question [What is truth?] earnestly – we cannot let it go unanswered." This is the function, not only of the ...

By Randall Smith I will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me. The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not. Now, I don't think this statement is especially controversial – most people don't want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending on the context. So why am I saying it? I have been concerned about the treatment of immigrants for a while. I was concerned, for example, when President Barack Obama was deporting 3.1 million immigrants over his eight years in office, a number far in excess of what the Trump administration has carried out. According to DHS, between Trump's January 2025 inauguration and December, the administration had deported 605,000 illegal aliens. ProPublica reports that ICE also detained 170 U.S. citizens during the year, which is true, but according to The New York Post, 130 of them were arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers. Only about 40 or so were detained accidentally or erroneously, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours. By contrast, in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (bookings), and four mistaken removals of U.S. citizens. When President Obama's Director of Intergovernmental Affairs was questioned about the Obama record on immigration and replied: "What the president is doing is enforcing the law of the land." To her credit, one person who noticed the problem back then was Maria Hinojosa, whose 2011 Frontline special "Lost in Detention" should be viewed to get a sense of how many of the same issues upsetting people now were happening then, but with much less bitter opposition or controversy. I don't remember hordes of people demonstrating violently then, putting themselves between ICE officers and immigrants. I don't remember masked citizens putting up check points to keep ICE agents out. Even if you lauded all those actions now, you have to admit they weren't happening back then. And back then, Obama was deporting millions more immigrants than Donald Trump has been able to deport. I don't remember the Democrats in Congress shutting down the government to force changes in ICE then. So too, I don't recall a host of Catholic bishops falling all over themselves to stand boldly against the Obama administration. A Google search turned up only one USCCB position paper done by a lawyer on immigration enforcement, a host of praises of Obama for delaying some deportations, and an article in America magazine titled "Catholic bishops urge end to Obama administration's surge of deportations." Which is less overwhelming than the title promises, because, as it turns out, "the bishops" were in fact one bishop and an auxiliary bishop. This was not exactly an overwhelming flood of criticism. Even the website of the Minnesota Catholic praised President Obama's "deferred action" executive order, but did so reassuring people that Obama wasn't too extreme. "Most people with whom I spoke," writes the author of the article, "who were initially opposed to the president's action, supported it when they heard what it did and did not do." The author continued: The confusion surrounding the executive action is emblematic of an immigration debate that has been distorted both by the impassioned dislike of President Obama and a media culture that, unfortunately, turns most political debates into either-or policy choices. . . .Commentary on and reaction to the president's action has generated more heat than light and has fit into the false parameters of the public immigration debate: Either open our borders to all comers and grant "amnesty," or deport all those who are here. The president's order is not "amnesty" in the popular sense of the term, which would mean forgiving undocumented persons, requiring no penalty of any kind, and providing t...

By Robert Royal. Nuclear weapons, like other modern technological developments, have placed great strains on traditional moral principles. Just as modern medicine has changed our appreciation of the beginning and end of human life, the tremendous destructive power of modern weapons, nuclear and not, has made careful thought about war not only urgent, but – to use the fashionable term – existential. That's probably the main reason why the Vatican has seemed quasi-pacifist in recent decades. But the Church has a well-developed set of criteria about just and unjust uses of force. Indeed, in the past, it even – rightly – called for crusades. (I'll explain another time.) But those criteria – still valid in themselves – need further elaboration to confront the conditions in which we find ourselves. I have immediate family members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been active in U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, and worked in the Pentagon managing defense preparedness. Some of my grandchildren have been forced into air-raid shelters in Jerusalem; the others may someday face terrorism at home or, themselves, have to take part in foreign wars. Millions of Americans – and not only Americans – have similar stories. And unless we keep the human costs of warfare front and center in our minds, we may be tempted to take just-war theory as merely a political or intellectual exercise. That said, there are, of course, things worth dying for – and, regrettably, things worth killing for. That's precisely why just-war theory, a tradition of moral reflection that began in the ancient world, was developed – notably by Augustine and Aquinas, and is the common heritage of most modern militaries. Some of the best-informed students I've ever had on just wat over the years learned that tradition during U. S. military training. Academic types often scoff at this, but it's true. A good summary of just-war principles can be found here. (Our friend Phil Lawler has been re-examining them in strict fidelity to the Catholic tradition online here). But I want to look closely at just a few of them here to highlight some special circumstances that they now face. I'm not sure whether the U. S. attack on Iran these past few days is justified. A lot of people already claim to know, one way or the other. But I've seen enough similar situations to be willing to suspend judgment until we know more. (I've misjudged in the past.) Still, I am sure that the way to decide should be on Catholic just-war grounds, not just the wearying and utterly predictable pro- and anti-Trump tug-of-war. The first criterion is last resort. Resort to arms is a life-and-death matter. It should only be done when other means of addressing a threat have failed. But who decides when all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted? You can always claim that something else might be pursued. In the meantime, great evils may spread: Nature's polluted, There's man in every secret corner of her Doing damned, wicked deeds. The answer is that a legitimate authority has the responsibility to decide. But also must explain how everything reasonable has been tried, what the threat is, and why it's necessary, right now, to meet it. The president hasn't said nearly enough about this. There are rumors that Iran was planning a strike against U.S. forces. If so, we need an authoritative statement about that – and more. Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis (and maybe a few campus fellow-travelers) may lose sleep over the fall of the Islamic Republic. No one else will. Everybody has agreed that "Iran must not develop a nuclear weapon" (existential threat), but done little beyond talk – for half a century. So it's good that the president has put the attack in terms of defense, both immediate and long-term. But we still need to know much more. A second criterion is just cause: Wars of conquest, in our tradition, are never just. Our intention must be to achieve some good by righting a wrong, actual or imminent. We c...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky. The Transfiguration reveals the mystery of Christ's Person. In His glorified body, He stands as the fulfillment of the Law with Moses and of the Prophets with Elijah. He is the beloved Son of the Father, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Yet Tabor cannot be separated from Calvary, nor Calvary from Easter morning. The Apostles could not grasp this at once. Comprehension required time, memory, and grace. What was revealed had to be received before it could be understood. This pattern is woven into human life itself: mystery first, then revelation, then understanding. And even understanding does not exhaust mystery; it opens us to still more. This same pattern governs ordinary experience. A young man may take up manual work without fully knowing why. Skill comes slowly – through correction, repetition, and trust in those who know more than he does. Eventually, he produces something solid and recognizable as his own – perhaps just a table. Yet even so, he did not create from nothing. His achievement rests on instruction, materials, discipline, and the wisdom of others. What he makes is truly his, but it is not his alone. Our vocations follow a similar path. We consider whether our lives should follow marriage, single life, or religious life. The answer rarely comes with initial certainty. Discernment requires observation and testing. Motives must be examined. Decisions arise from attention to circumstances and to God's direction. As understanding of one's vocation grows, it can reveal deeper questions about purpose, service, and God's plan. Clarity comes only through disciplined inquiry. Once a vocation is assumed, it requires continuity. Fidelity depends on discipline and consistent effort. The vocation is not our voice. Properly discerned, it is the voice of God. We manage His plan for us as stewards. Responsibility stems from our performing what is assigned, rather than imposing our personal agendas. The more we understand our vocation, the more we become aware of its depth and participation in broader mysteries. Intellectual inquiry, too, follows a comparable pattern. Integrating the sacraments with daily living, harmonizing faith and reason, is difficult. Atheists drive a wedge between faith and reason. Atheists commonly argue that the available evidence does not warrant belief in God. They argue that material processes, evolution, and chance explain existence. But the very existence of the universe raises questions. It is ordered and intelligible. Scientific investigation presupposes that reality is coherent. The question is not whether mechanisms operate. They do. But why is the world structured in such a way that makes rational investigation possible? Understanding in science does not exhaust mystery; it directs reflection toward the transcendent source of intelligibility. A clock does not assemble itself. Its ordered parts presuppose intelligence. So too the intelligibility of the universe points beyond itself. The questions raised by atheists, pursued honestly, lead not to the dismissal of a Divine Clockmaker but toward a deeper appreciation of Him. Acknowledging a Creator raises another question: Has He revealed Himself? The Christian claim is that He has: through Israel's history, through the life and teaching of Christ, and through the Church's witness. Faith relies on testimony. It allows understanding to develop without eliminating mystery, and each insight opens us to deeper truths of God's plan. Suffering, of course, presents a persistent challenge. Atheists commonly ask, "How can an all-good God allow the presence of evil?" A child with cancer presents the reality with terrible clarity. Suffering itself is not morally evil. It is our encounter with disorder, deprivation, and the effects of sin. No argument removes the fact of suffering. Even an atheist cannot explain away the mystery. The protest against suffering presupposes that things ought to be otherwise. How does an ath...

By Kristen Ziccarelli My generation, Gen Z, has been graduating from college for about ten years now, and is typically told some variation of the same message at Commencement: go forth and change the world. But not everyone can change the world. And perhaps it's worth considering that not everyone should. The charge to change the world presupposes something of a utilitarian calculus: try to maximize the greatest change for the greatest number of people. Many will invariably try and fail. Where are they left? Right after graduating from college, I was leaving Mass at a Jesuit Basilica, and I noticed a small flyer pinned near the exit. Beneath a photograph of then Blessed Carlo Acutis were the words: "You too can become a saint." The contrast was arresting. "You can become a saint" is radically different from "you too can solve the world's problems." The former is universal and attainable; the latter, though not inherently wrong, is neither the purpose of life nor achievable for most of us. The saints have, indeed, changed the world, but primarily as a consequence of their devotion to Christ. They lived through their faith in the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which is a Person. The Christian call is not to change the world, but to strive towards sainthood – and to let God change the world through you. As the Second Vatican Council's Lumen gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) declared, sainthood is not solely for the clergy or for the hardworking few: "All men are called to this union with Christ, who is the light of the world, from whom we go forth, through whom we live, and toward whom our whole life strains." Saint Irenaeus reminds us that the Glory of God is a man fully alive. Striving towards sainthood is the essence of living life fully. Doing this in the modern world, though, inherently means going upstream against a river that is not just agnostic about sainthood, but generally opposed to the radical centeredness on God required for the saintly way. Dedicating your life wholly to anything is not the way of today's world. The classical world better understood and, perhaps, also empowered the genuine striving of the obsessive, unrelenting soul. But God's call for us, even today, was never meant as anything but that. The saints are united in their passion for following the will of God. It was from this that their world-changing actions flowed. Despite modern hostility to the Church's teachings, the message of sainthood is finding new life in odd places, particularly among younger generations. Spain, for instance, has recently displayed some of the most fruitful examples of public figures receiving the call to holiness – seriously and openly. Last year, for example, Pablo Garna, a Spanish model and social media influencer, announced his decision to enter seminary, as did TikTok influencer Juan Manasa. Álvaro Ferraro, a businessman who founded four companies by the age of 30, left his professional life behind to pursue the priesthood. "My only dream and desire," he said, "is to be a saint." Public figures like these, and our "millennial" saint Carlo Acutis, are precisely the examples needed to ignite redeeming countercultural aspirations in an age of distraction and of mediocrity on demand. These cultural influencers are compelling for the radical upheaval they cause in their worldly lives, but also because they are quite obviously normal. They are not quiet monks, distantly praying daily on some mountain. As Bishop Robert Barron often says, "A saint is a person who knows they are a sinner." So, we need to help people understand that saints, like heroes, are not models of perfection, but instances of normal human striving toward holiness. Another message that resonates with my generation is that saints are people who believed wholeheartedly that their sins were not beyond redemption. The knowledge that one is deeply loved by God, redeemed by Christ, and made for Heaven is medicine for the wo...

By Stephen P. White. Lent is in full swing now. If you are like me, you enter this season full of determination and enthusiasm: My prayer will be deeper. My penance will be purer. My almsgiving will be richer. And may it well be so for all of us! But if you are like me, you also know that the Lenten journey doesn't always finish with the same fervor with which it began. I can remember Lents – more than I care to admit – in which my best laid plans for fasting or scheduled prayer were soon derailed. I recall one year, many years ago, beginning Lent on retreat with a small group in Rome. When we met for Mass on Ash Wednesday, I was asked to do the readings. Now, reading or speaking in public does not bother me in the least, but singing – that is a very different matter. On that day. I was so full of Lenten zeal that I resolved to swallow my pride, humble myself, and intone the Gospel acclamation. After all, I was on retreat! On Ash Wednesday! In Rome! And so I sang with gusto. I sang from my diaphragm. I belted out the Alleluia. I noticed the embarrassed faces about halfway through my triumphant, liturgical faux pas. They weren't looking at me. Their eyes were all fixed on the floor as they wondered if they should reply or not. I didn't have the heart to look over at the priest. I finished the offending tune, walked to my seat, and, in a mostly metaphorical sense, died. (I'm sure – and I mean this in the most serious theological way – that God was deeply amused. God exists outside of time, so I suspect all the embarrassing things we think "will be funny one day" are immediately funny to him. But I admit that is speculation.) That was about as mortifying a beginning to Lent as I can remember, but it set the whole tone for what was, in truth, one of the more fruitful Lents I can remember. Public embarrassment, it turns out, can have a bracing effect on the soul. When it comes to persistence in penance, I find that it helps to enlist others to keep me accountable. The Lord's admonition to fast in secret notwithstanding, the watchful eye of others can sometimes move us toward virtue in a way that mere willpower and good intentions cannot. Spouses are very good for this sort of accountability. Children are even better. In my experiences, siblings have a preternatural ability to know what their brothers and sisters have given up for Lent and are at least as enthusiastic about calling one another to account for slip-ups as they are zealous in keeping their own fasts. And hearing a 7-year-old comment, with something approaching innocence, "Dad, I thought you gave that up for Lent," is a powerful corrective to a weak-willed parent. Keeping up appearances does not do justice to the true purpose of Lenten penance – the Lord clearly warns about this – but it is not entirely a bad thing either. Better a penance kept with outside prodding than a penance shattered on the rocks of half-baked Pelagian zeal, however pure. Of course, helping one another to keep our fasts, to say our prayers, or to be really generous in our almsgiving need not be a form of moral scorekeeping. Supporting one another in our Lenten practices and having the humility to rely on such support in turn are both acts of charity. Lent is a communal journey as much as a personal one. Or rather, it is communal precisely because it is personal. The Church's own prescribed penances of fasting and abstinence (including on Fridays outside of Lent) were most efficacious when they were more uniformly kept. That may seem like a tautology, but it is not. It is easier to behave a certain way when you are around lots of other people who are trying to behave the same way. To be "normal" is to live according to the norms – the expectations and precepts – of the community to which one belongs. When the norms of the community are directed toward what is good, it becomes normal to be good. So surround yourself with other penitents. Do your friends and family the favor of holding them (gen...

By Michael Pakaluk Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech two weeks ago at the Munich Security Conference has been praised for its conciliatory tone, and even for its putative revival of grand political oratory. Looked at from the point of view of recent papal commentary on Europe, its origin and destiny, Rubio's remarks were welcome, but incomplete. Yet he cannot be faulted for that; Europe has left him little choice in the matter. Gabriel Marcel used to say that life in general has an existential character. You must seize the moment, or risk being like some sad ticket holder on the platform who just missed his train. I think of Marcel's image when I look back to the debates, twenty years ago, over whether the new European Union should recognize its debt to Christianity in the Preamble to the EU constitution. A "constitution" is just what the word says – as the great Jewish legal scholar, Joseph Weiler, warned everyone then – it is a people's "constituting itself." What they say in that moment fixes who they are, and what they will become. The European Union had a chance to constitute itself as having a Christian heritage, and it deliberately turned against it, speaking instead in bland terms about its commitments to "humanism," "progress," and "transparency." Does it have any means now of going back to that missed train? In his speech, Rubio reiterated several items from the "What We Want" section of the Trump administration's recent National Security Strategy, wrapping these up in warm fuzzies about Dante, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus, and American settlers from the old country: • Europe must assume more responsibility for its own defense; • practice fair trade; • and not insist on a supposed "rules-based order," which cannot guarantee peace, and which is often manipulated to undermine U.S. interests. • Furthermore, Europe must not continue to undermine itself, out of an overwrought guilt, through mass immigration policies that erode nationhood. No diplomat there was surprised by the list. What they welcomed was Rubio's communicating, through all the warm fuzzies, that "we are in this together, because we have a shared heritage and civilization." Yet here precisely was where Rubio was incapable of addressing directly the fundamental issue – again, because of Europe, not because of us. "We are part of one civilization – Western civilization," he said. But Western civilization is Christian civilization. "We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry." Ah, yes. But Europe was incapable of acknowledging that history and heritage. It did not constitute itself with such language. "The alliance that we want," the Secretary said, "is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children." Not quite. "We" (and especially "they") are evidently confronted with the fear of simply not having children – the "demographic decline" not mentioned by the Secretary in his speech. Europe, having turned away from Christianity, seems to have lost any boldness for having children at all. It suffers from hopelessness. For a deep treatment of this problem, see Pope Benedict XVI Saved in Hope. I wondered as I was reading the speech: Exactly how clever is Rubio? Is he speaking with an awareness that he is a representative of a genuine nation, addressing an assemblage of nations which, except on one condition, has no real unity? Was his aim, without his saying it explicitly, actually to telegraph to the Europeans that their best hope for continued unity, as nations and among themselves, is unity with us – who, by contrast, are indeed a Christian nation, de facto? Pope John Paul II wa...

By Francis X. Maier. Remember the fabulous 1970s? The decade of Watergate, recession, gas lines, defeat in Vietnam, unemployment, inflation, and a failed Iranian hostage rescue? Add to that the advent of "whole language" theory in education. Whoever came up with that idea needs a one-way ticket to Svalbard. Check the map. It's not Las Vegas. Mention "whole language" to my wife, a 40-year veteran of teaching in Catholic schools, and she'll laugh you out of the room. Whole language theory held that learning to read through meaning and context was superior to traditional classroom methods. Also more "authentic." Teaching the young should thus reflect this. Children, it claimed, would naturally absorb sound-letter relationships through mere exposure to the printed word. Instruction in phonics – learning the relationship between sounds and the letter combinations that represent them – was downgraded, especially in public education. So too was grammar. The rules of grammar were seen as artificial and deadening. Consider the results. As early as the mid-1980s, national reading skills had clearly declined. Consequences followed. Christopher Lasch, the distinguished author and University of Rochester professor, felt forced to publish Plain Style, a manual to fix his elite students' inept writing. Today, more than half of American adults read at less than a sixth-grade level. Twenty-seven percent read no books annually. Twenty-one percent are functionally illiterate. Nearly a third of graduating high school seniors read below the basic proficiency level. Nineteen percent can barely read at all. Predictably, student reasoning skills have likewise declined. Whole language theory is far from the only factor that fed these problems. But it helped set them in motion. Modern digital technologies, heavily image-driven, have simply compounded them. Early in Plain Style, Lasch notes that [Today] even those who can write a passable sentence. . .often find it beyond their power to arrange sentences so that one follows another in logical order. To construct a coherent paragraph, let alone a coherent essay, dissertation or monograph, exceeds their command of language. . . .Every point [in a text should lead] logically to the next, and every paragraph, every sentence even, adds something to the last, carrying the argument firmly forward to a conclusion that seems both effortless and irresistible because it has been so carefully prepared. Bad writing suggests confused and lazy thinking. We fix, or at least improve, our reasoning skills by reading – books of substance, lots of them, varied and good. Screens have their uses (like sharing these words), but they fatigue the eye and brain. Books are tactile and silent; the print is still and permanent; the imagination thereby gets fed. Books demand focus. The best books also reward it, because in the process, they teach the fertile use of words and ideas. No single model of good writing exists. It can't. Histories, biographies, religious works, and fiction each need unique things from an author. Canyons of style separate Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" from Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle;" Graham Greene's "The Hint of an Explanation" from Terry Southern's "The Road Out of Axotle." All are little jewels of talent. Each has the stamp of the author's personality. But every good writer first grasps the power of words, and then masters the rules of grammar before violating them for best effect. So what constitutes "bad" writing? George Orwell was no friend of the Catholic Church, but he wrote a supremely useful essay – Politics and the English Language – for anyone who seeks to think clearly and write well. His main targets were the calculated lying and evasion that mark so much of modern politics. But the value of his essay goes well beyond politics. Vague, insincere, lazy, and confused language inevitably corrupts thought. A mass of complicated words, he wrote, can "[fall] upon the facts...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza State of the Union addresses consume copious energy in the White House speechwriting shop, which is odd, given how quickly they are forgotten. President Bill Clinton declared that the "era of big government is over" in 1996, but can anyone remember any other address? Thirty years on, President Donald Trump will deliver the State of the Union address tonight. In 1986, the State of the Union had been prepared; there was a midday luncheon to brief the media on what to watch for. President Ronald Reagan would speak to the American people that day, but at 5 p.m., not prime time, from the Oval Office, not the Capitol, and from a brief text quickly drafted. The space shuttle Challenger had exploded upon lift-off. Schoolchildren had been watching in their classrooms; a teacher had been on board. All seven astronauts had died. The State of the Union was postponed. Reagan instead delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his long career. And that speech launched a compelling Catholic voice on the national scene. Peggy Noonan had joined Reagan's speechwriting team, having honed her skills drafting daily radio commentaries for Dan Rather of CBS. She had worked on Reagan's 1984 speech at Pointe-du-Hoc for the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. But the Challenger speech was something else. The audience was far larger, the moment immediate and raw, not historic and nostalgic. Reagan spoke, in turn, to those who mourned – the families, schoolchildren, workers at NASA, the American people. He recommitted to the space program, despite the loss – praised the spirit of adventure and discovery, likening it to the great explorers in centuries past. He concluded with lines from John Gillespie Magee's poem High Flight, the national anthem of aviation. He did not mention Magee, nor name the poem. The lines were assumed to be part of the common literary patrimony of Americans. Magee was born in 1922 in Shanghai to an American father and British mother, both Anglican missionaries. He was the eldest of four brothers and won his school's poetry prize at age 16. In 1940, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force – the United States had still not entered the war – in order to fight overseas. He arrived in the United Kingdom in August 1941 and flew his first sortie over occupied France in November. He died in December not over France, but Lincolnshire, colliding midair with fellow airmen on a training flight. He wrote High Flight after a Spitfire training mission that went up to 33,000 feet. Exhilarated, he mailed it to his parents in early September. After his death, his father published it in his parish bulletin, and it spread through the church press. Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress, discovered it and gave it wider circulation, comparing it with John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, the definitive elegy of the Great War. Noonan knew the poem – and suspected Reagan did too. After the Challenger speech, Reagan told Noonan that it had been engraved on a plaque at his daughter's school. High Flight is now engraved on the Challenger memorial. A posthumously published poem from a brave aviator, testing the then boundaries of flight, was perfect for the Challenger. Magee begins with "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth" and concludes with something of a prayer, having "put out my hand, and touched the face of God." The Challenger speech quoted those lines, and increased Noonan's renown, remarkable for speechwriters who are usually anonymous. She later wrote of a "kinder, gentler nation" for George Bush, Sr., made so by a "thousand points of light." She would write a lovely memoir of the Reagan administration, What I Saw at the Revolution (1990) – a book so popular that it had a twentieth-anniversary edition for the centennial of Reagan's birth in 2011. She followed with another book on Reagan, When Character Was King (2001), and one on another hero, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father (2005). She has writt...

By Robert Royal. The following is adapted from an address given at the Chesterton Academy, Vero Beach, Florida February 19, 2026. Those of you already engaged in this wonderful institution don't need me to tell you the inestimable value of reading great books even at an early age. And for those of you who may be discovering this academy for the first time, let me just say that I would have been grateful myself to have been able to attend such a place, which unfortunately did not exist when I was young. It was a great need back then, an even greater one now when we've lost even more of our religious and cultural heritage. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that without educational institutions like this one, the days will rapidly grow even darker and more chaotic for both America and Christianity. But there is a path out, as I've tried to suggest in the title above, which is drawn from a poem in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. Now, like all poems, this one bears multiple meanings, and like all good poems it has a significance beyond even those meanings, because it opens a door to the world, a larger world and some larger way that we must remain aware of if we're to remain fully human. That, it seems to me, is the crucial value of Chesterton Academies, even as they teach the more usual skills that we all need to manage our lives in our more mundane world. As I say, I did not have the benefit of a school like this, but I did have two key advantages in addition to growing up in an intact family: a Catholic Church that in its liturgies and schools conveyed a great deal implicitly. I've often joked that the young nuns who taught me as a child probably never read Aristotle, or even Aquinas. But the Church that formed them had, and they conveyed that rational sanity of those two great figures, a sanity that meshed perfectly with the ordinary virtues that we also were living out at home. And there was one more thing: Latin. Like a lot of boys my age, I memorized the responses to what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass – I could still rattle off a number of them today. Memorizing the Latin responses had the advantage that you could serve at Mass – and you could get out of school to serve at funerals, often almost the whole day, and you could get tips at those and weddings. So, Latin has always had a certain baseline affection, and even today Latin words have a certain aura for me. There was one other experience I had that set me on the larger way that I hope I am still on. It must have been in the late fall of my junior year, right after Thanksgiving, because I played football and the season was over. There were still autumn leaves on the trees. We'd been reading Virgil's Aeneid in Latin, last period. After school, I was walking with a few friends over to someone's house under those autumnal colors. Out of nowhere a sense of the long stretch of time and the recurring seasons and all the people that had lived and died since Virgil's day, which was also Jesus', came over me in ways that I still can't entirely express. But I knew and have known since that there was some larger way – and I have labored ever since to be worthy of it and to convey some portion of it to others. I wouldn't say that is the sole purpose of true education, but it's central. As our newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman once remarked, "The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution." Many people today assume that technical knowledge and government schools are all we need to form citizens and flourishing human lives, with science on the rationalist side and literature or the humanities more broadly on the humanist and emoti...

But first a note from Robert Royal: Fr. Scalia reminds us that the Devil divides: us from others and us from ourselves. And, because yesterday was the 225th anniversary of Saint John Henry Newman's birth, Amy Fahey pays tribute to that great saint and those saints and martyrs who may have made him possible. Now for The Limits of Salvation by Fr. Paul D. Scalia If God didn't want them to eat of the tree, why did He put it there? That question is not as adolescent and petulant as it might sound. God is not haphazard in His Creation. He must have had a reason to place that one forbidden tree in the garden. The Catechism explains it nicely: that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil "evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust." (CCC 396) Now, to "freely recognize and respect with trust" is one thing the Devil just cannot do. He wants his created gifts on his own, without a Creator or Giver. He refuses to recognize or respect his creaturely limits. Non serviam, he boasts. I will not serve. . . .I will not observe limits. Misery loves company, so the Devil wants to reproduce his mindset in others. His first victims are Adam and Eve. (Genesis 3:1-7) He asks, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?" He's not asking to get an answer. He's suggesting that limits are absurd and anyone who sets them is hostile. God is against you because He's limited you. Adam and Eve take the bait. They reach beyond their appointed place, and in their very grasping, they fall. The Devil has the same game plan when he approaches Jesus in the desert. (Matthew 4:1-11) Now, if the Devil cannot understand the blessings of creatureliness, then the limitations of the Incarnation are absolutely impenetrable to him. The Incarnation is not a fiction or make-believe. God really did confine and limit Himself to our human nature – to be born of a woman, to experience exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and sorrow. Even to be tempted. The Devil cannot grasp the eternal Son's joyful dependence on the Father: "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord. . . .I can do nothing on my own authority." (John 5:19, 30) Nor can he understand the Son's joyful embrace of our created human nature. For Satan, divine power means doing whatever you want – not serving anybody. It certainly doesn't mean setting limits for yourself by humility. So he nudges Jesus beyond the limits. If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread. Jesus experiences hunger in His human nature and joyfully trusts His Father to sustain Him. Nor will He use His divine power to create a shortcut in His ministry, to provide physical instead of spiritual nourishment. His response points to dependence, limits, and trust in God: One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God. Someday, Jesus will feed people miraculously with loaves of bread. Indeed, He will give Himself as the Bread of Life. Adam was deceived by a false hunger and grasped for the fruit of the tree. Hung on the tree of the Cross, the New Adam nourishes us with the Eucharist, His own Body and Blood. He does so not for Himself but in obedience to the Father's will for our good. Then the second temptation. The Devil proposes a daring display, that Jesus cast Himself from the parapet of the temple and presume that the Father will save Him. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. In effect, Prove it. Jesus' divine power is boundless, but not pointless. It is, in a sense, confined by reason and purpose. He will one day work miracles. He will exorcize and heal, walk on water and multiply loaves of bread. But these miracles are not parlor games. He doesn't perform them to prove Himself. Indeed, He rebukes those who (like the Devil) demand signs. (Matthew 16:4; 12:39) His divine power is not wielded capriciously, but for our good – to reveal, instruct, and i...

By Eduard Habsburg When it comes to the joys of large families, there's more than just an ocean between Europe and the United States. This is what I discovered when I began to regularly travel between the two continents and give talks on the topic of the family. A full disclaimer first: I believe family is the greatest thing, and by family, I mean a large family. My wife and I were blessed with six children, and that experience has been life-changing, the greatest thing that ever happened to me (besides my faith, of course). So, naturally, I enjoy speaking about having many children. It will not surprise you to learn that being happily married and having a bunch of children is not the rule in old Europe. People are often shocked when I mention six kids. It is literally unheard of. It's considered unreasonable even among more traditionally-minded families. In Italy, where I lived for ten years until recently, it took me three years of driving a car through the streets of Rome until I saw a pregnant woman crossing the road. And this was supposed to be the Catholic country, the land of bambini. But then something very interesting happened a few years ago, when I crossed the pond to speak at an event in the United States. Before the talk, I was a guest at a dinner, where I was introduced to a lot of young Catholics. I spoke of being married and of my six children. Nobody was shocked. In fact, two young women who greeted me told me they had seven and eight kids respectively, and how great it was to have a large family. They looked at me with something approaching pity, and you could almost hear them thinking: "Well, perhaps the Lord will give him some more children." And I have to admit that, now, I was the one who was slightly shocked. The funny thing was, these were not super well-off families. They couldn't "easily afford" lots of children. No, I had the impression they were Catholics with a deep conviction that large families are what God loves and encourages in a marriage. As these testimonies multiplied, I discovered a whole world that would be very hard to find in Western Europe. I encountered dozens of families (with lots of children) queuing up at talks about faith and especially about Blessed Emperor Karl, the last ruler of my Habsburg family. He, of course, had eight children and was a pillar of the faith. Remarkably, he seems to be very inspiring to a fair number of people in the United States. It was this experience (and our own family history) that led me to write my second book, Building a Wholesome Family in a Broken World, which is a strong encouragement to having large families. Yes, I am very much aware that large families are not the norm, even in the United States. But in America, it seems at least possible to speak about that subject. In large parts of Europe, that is quite unthinkable. And sometimes I worry what will happen when my book will be translated into, say, German. What Americans can understand or at least respect may lead to outright hostility in the German-speaking world: a large family is not reasonable, it's not affordable, it kills my personal freedom, it ties women to the kitchen and turns back the wheel of progress (or it's bad for the environment). In such a climate (no pun intended), even someone as enthusiastic as I am has to choose his words carefully when speaking about the family. The worst part is that many Catholic pastors (and unfortunately also some bishops) play along with the secular game. They encourage couples not to have children too soon, to take their time, to "enjoy each other," to put off having children until you can afford them, etc. While I can understand that such Catholic leaders fear being labelled "radical", they should consider their responsibilities. Because – and this is my main contention here – I believe that you won't fully embark on the adventure of having a large family without faith. And if even your faith leaders discourage you, from where, then, should ...

By David Warren The founder of worldly Christendom, by Christianizing the Roman Empire, and ending at least for a moment the persecution of Christians in his realm, was famously a pagan until he finally converted on his deathbed. To the end, long after his victory under the Sign of the Cross in the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine was careful to maintain the secular signs of his power. In Eusebius of Caesarea, we read that the (self-appointed) Emperor of the West witnessed the Sign of the Cross, above the sun, on that battlefield, and the words τούτῳ νίκα – "By this, conquer" – radiating from it. That Christianity should spread by conquest was a (divine) paradox. In our liberal, modern worldview, it appears even more of a paradox than it did to Constantine's contemporaries. It is in conflict with our abstract Christianity, which cannot confess anything as vulgar and physical as military conquest. Balancing this, the modern is also unhappy with accounts of the physical persecution, which reached its peak under Diocletian. In his later Vita Constantini, Eusebius reported that in the night after, Christ appeared to Constantine in a dream, and told him to make a copy of what he had seen in the sky; and that this Cross would protect him against very physical attacks. Again, I look at this through eyes that are modern. The Church to which we belong owes its historical existence to events that are purported to have happened in the world. But then, adding to our perplexity, the Church of the very First Century also formed from an event that happened in the real world. For we acknowledge that Christ came down from Heaven, and ascended to Heaven conspicuously AFTER His death in the world. Mind touches matter in these matters, and is recorded in the annals of the world. And so long as we live in the world, we are compelled to acknowledge the acknowledgement, even if we deny or dispute the truth of what happened. That I neither deny nor dispute is, like faith in general, unlikely to convince anybody, after the passage of so many centuries, though the fact it is still plausible to many millions may seem at least startling. But when it is considered that the same argument can be made for Islam, and several dozen other "belief systems," we satisfy by dissatisfying the modern mind. I count "modern science" as one of those belief systems, or rather among them, for no two modern scientists will subscribe to exactly the same thing, even if what the propagandists say is true – that 97 percent of them subscribe to anthropogenic global warming. And men such as Richard Dawkins compare the Christian God to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and do this quite glibly. For modern Disbelief does not feel the obligation to be serious, which Christians and other sincere believers were constrained by, through this vast interval of time. It is the combination of a belief in casual, changeable things (like constantly updated "science"), with easy retreat into disbelief in anything, that characterizes our modern view. Not belief or faith, but a settled attitude of radical cynicism and skepticism has brought about an era in which the very existence of a fact is ground for methodical rejection in the academy and elsewhere. Our children are taught that nothing can be true, except what they choose to believe, or "my truth" specifically. Use the word "truth," and one is immediately at a disadvantage in most discussions I have had with moderns throughout my adult life, and, curiously, I quit high school when I realized that this was the attitude they were inculcating. Only in classics, math, and physics was this ever relaxed. The ancient Sophists were not so settled in their own rejections of reality, and tended to accept what they could see and taste. And so, the Constantinian miracle tends to be neglected, or actually mocked, when it must be confronted. For we are not Christians by philosophical abstraction, but in an historical frame; just as Christ must also...